The use of materials comprising plastically deformable materials has increased in a number of industries. Solder balls are an example of an object comprising a plastically deformable material. The use of solder balls is wide-spread in the microelectronic packaging industry. The testing of solder ball assemblies in microelectronic packages is well known in the industry. Various techniques exist which test the strength and fitness of solder ball assemblies. Some methods involve in-line testing and others are after process testing methods. Most in-process methods are destructive, the in-line methods also tend to be slower in that one solder ball assembly at a time is tested. Current testing methods involve testing the force required to "lift" or shear a solder ball from its original location, such that the entire solder ball assembly is relocated. While it is possible to test more than one solder ball assembly at one time, since an accurate calculation of the force necessary to move each individual solder ball is difficult to determine when more than one is moved at a time it would be advantageous to explore the possibility of other testing techniques.
Other methods of testing the fitness of solder ball assemblies involve testing the assemblies after processing is complete. The after process methods can be both destructive and non-destructive. The after processing testing can be disadvantageous because large quantities of product can be produced before the non-conformity is identified. Additionally, in high production scenarios where product is shipped quickly, non-conforming product may already have been shipped before the non-conformity is discovered.
The time and resources needed to test solder ball assemblies increases as the complexities of the underlying packages increases. In the case of packages having grid arrays of solder ball assemblies, both ceramic and ball grid array packages, the amount of space between the solder balls decreases with each generation of packages and the complexity of the circuitry in the packages increases with each passing generation. The time and difficulty of in line testing each solder ball individually using current methods makes it difficult to further process the chips at the speed necessary to ensure that the packages can be produced using high speed processing techniques. Thus there remains a need for a method of testing solder ball assemblies where more than one solder ball assembly is tested during one testing interval. There also remains a need for a method of testing solder ball assemblies where the testing can occur in-line before large quantities of product are produced.